Johann Dusentschur pushed his way through the crowd and climbed with difficulty upon the table. “Listen to me,” he said; he had just had another vision from God. Before this day should end, the Lord had told him, the New Zion must send forth its apostles to all four corners of the land to oppose the enemy and to spread His word. The Lord had called out the names of the twenty-seven chosen messengers, his new apostles, and told Dusentschur to write them in the register that the crippled goldsmith now held before him like the tablets of Moses.
Spontaneous though Dusentschur’ performance may have seemed, it shared the qualities of calculated melodrama that marked virtually everything that happened in Jan van Leyden’s peculiar playhouse. It seems likely, given the composition of the list of names, that Jan was hoping to accomplish two ends, both related to keeping and extending his power. The first was to stir up support for Münster from nearby cities. The second, less obvious, reason, may have been to rid himself of competition for leadership and influence—Dusentschur himself, so instrumental in elevating Jan to the throne and consequently a figure of growing powers, was among the named messengers.
The meticulous planning that preceded the announcement was evident in the preciseness of Dusentschur’s instructions. Eight men, including Dusentschur, would depart by way of Servatii Gate south toward Soest; six, including the schoolmaster Henry Graes, through the Hörster Gate north toward Osnabrück; eight through the Virgin Mary’s Gate west toward Coesfeld; and five through the St. Mauritz Gate east toward Warendorf. They were all to leave the city before dawn and should announce their joyful presence wherever they were sent.
One after another, the men whose names God had told Dusentschur to write down in his register came before him for instructions and to confirm their allegiance. He then tore the register of their names into four pieces and scattered them to the wind. If those to whom they carried God’s message refused to hear and obey, he said, they would be scattered to the flaming winds of hell just as these flimsy parchments were now carried away by the evening breeze.
But the limping prophet had one more service to perform before his departure. “Jan van Leyden,” he called out, “where are you? I call upon you!” Jan, who was now sitting, head bowed, at Dusentschur’s feet, slowly lifted his head and said, with renewed vigor, “I am here!” The prophet said to Jan that he could not lay aside his kingly duties. The Lord had revealed to him, Johann Dusentschur, that Jan must continue to punish the ungodly without mercy. He picked up the crown that Jan had put aside and placed it on the young man’s head; he hung the golden chain about his neck; and he placed the discarded scepter in his hand. The end of the present evil time was at hand, the prophet said; the time of the thousand-year kingdom was about to begin, under the guidance of King Jan.
As the twenty-seven apostles left to bid their wives farewell—one hundred and thirty-four wives in total!—Jan announced to the crowd, resuming his stern manner, that they had now eaten and drunk their fill, and had heard the word of God. They should accordingly return to their work and their homes. Something of the confusion these people must have felt comes through in Gresbeck’s narrative of the day’s events. They had been threatened with death at dawn; at noon they had been grandly feted; at dusk their king had declared his unworthiness, only to be reinstated by the strange goldsmith from Warendorf, who had exiled himself and much of the leadership of the Company of Christ to virtually certain death. The king himself had changed before their eyes from fierce warrior to gentle lamb of Christ to self-doubting wretch and, finally, back to stern master of their fates.
Now, as the chosen ones prepared to leave the City of God, the king sat down to a new banquet with his queen, his main advisers, including Knipperdolling, the Krechting brothers, and Bernard Rothmann, and a few minor functionaries. The bare tables that had been used earlier were covered with damask tablecloths brought from von Buren’s mansion, and silver candelabra were placed upon them. Announced by trumpets, servants brought heaps of steaming meats on golden platters and poured wine from the Bishop’s cellars into golden cups.
Strangely, the king’s mood seemed to darken as the festivities wore on, and for a long time he sat staring straight ahead, without expression. Then he beckoned abruptly to an aide. “Go to the prison where the unbelievers are kept,” he said, and bring one of them, one of the Bishop’s Landsknechten, to him now. He must also bring him his sword, Jan said, for it would soon be used in judgment.
Here the two accounts of this incident by Kerssenbrück and Gresbeck differ interestingly. In Kerssenbrück’s version, as elaborated by Helmut Paulus in his novel, the prisoner is first given a heaping plate of food, which he devours without hesitation; a beaker of red wine disappears and is refilled several times. After watching the drunken soldier gorge himself, Jan turns to him with contempt and asks, “What is your faith?” “Why ask me such a question?” the prisoner replies insolently. “I’m a soldier, not a preacher.” The king asks the soldier why he is not properly attired for such a holy ceremonial repast. “I wasn’t invited to this whore’s feast but forced to come with a sword at my back,” the soldier says. “Now that I’m here I’m happy to eat and drink my fill, even if a tailor’s dirty mouth has touched the cup.” Jan turns to his court. “I have received a sign!” he says. “Just as I will strike the head with its lying tongue from this soldier, you may strike my head off or burn me at the stake if I have not saved this holy city from the Bishop by Easter! Get up from the table and kneel before me!” he orders the soldier, who laughs drunkenly and says things have come to a fine pass when a tailor becomes a king. “I have a hole in my breeches, tailor. Will you sew it up for me?” Enraged, the king orders the soldier’s arms to be bound and strikes off his head.
Henry Gresbeck, who had been a soldier himself, has a less heroic version. There are no preliminaries—the soldier is hauled before the king and told to kneel. He refuses. Jan says he will cleave the soldier in two where he stands unless he obeys. The soldier begs for mercy and falls upon his knees. Jan cuts his head off without further ceremony.
The original accounts agree on at least two important points: that Jan himself performed the execution, with a sword like the one that today hangs next to his suit of armor on the wall of the City Museum in Münster; and that the headless corpse was left where it lay in the middle of the banquet until dawn while the party continued around it.
Nothing was heard from or of the apostles for days after their departure. Rumors, however, abounded of successes near and far. The mighty King of England, Henry VIII, had been re-baptized into their faith and now recognized King Jan as his sovereign. An Anabaptist army was about to invade Rome, the citadel of Satan, and overthrow the Pope. In the Netherlands thousands of supporters were arming their ships for an expedition shortly after the new year to rescue the besieged city of Münster.
More prosaically, and a good deal closer to home—for none of the four cities to which the apostles had been sent was more than a day or two away—circumstances were less promising. In Soest the irrepressible Dusentschur and his men gathered some followers and approached the City Hall, where the council was in session. They forced their way in with swords drawn. The council stared at the intruders and demanded to know their business. “Here is our sign,” Dusentschur said, and tossed a golden coin at the feet of the council president. The coin, newly minted in the New Zion, bore the likeness of King Jan and was imprinted with the king’s vow: “In God’s Power Is My Strength.” Dusentschur demanded the right to preach openly in the city, on pain of death at the hands of King Jan if they denied him. All of the intruders were seized immediately, jailed, and executed within days at the city gate. In an eerie echo of the death of Hille Feyken, Johann Dusentschur, “the boldest and least abashed, told the executioner he did not believe that he could die, that his neck would be unharmed by the sword. The executioner answered that he had expected trouble, and swung his sword with such force that it would have separated three heads from their necks.”
Warendorf, though much smaller than Münster, was a walled city barely fifteen miles from the heart of the insurrection and consequently a matter of great concern to the Bishop. Jan’s five apostles, led by a former soldier from Cologne, Johann Klopriss, were greeted enthusiastically by a sympathetic council, and more than fifty men and women were baptized. The Bishop sent a written directive to the council. They must not let themselves “be blinded by the juggling tricks” of the Anabaptists, or misled from the pure teachings of the Church by these disturbers of the peace, but hand them over to him for his mercy or his punishment.
When the Warendorf council staunchly replied that they supported Münster, the Bishop sent cavalry and foot soldiers to demand entry into the city. The intimidated citizens opened the gate, after receiving assurances that the city would not be plundered. When the troops entered the city, all the cannons were gathered in the market place and fired at the same time, their concussion breaking all the windows in town. The citizens handed over the preachers; the Bishop locked them up, along with the recently baptized citizens, whose names a council member had written down. The citizens had to give up their weapons and could not leave their houses. In addition to the weapons, the soldiers took the documents that guaranteed the rights of the city.
Most of the newly baptized men and women were imprisoned in Sassenburg and Iburg until their families could ransom their freedom. The instigators of the unrest did not escape so easily. On October 24, three days after the surrender, on a scaffold hastily constructed from planks and beer barrels, four of the preachers from Münster were beheaded; each of the four gates was then adorned with the head of a heretic. Also executed were the city counselor who had allowed the apostles to enter; a burgher who had destroyed a gilded statue of Christ in the churchyard; and the guard for the east gate who had vowed to tie a hair rope to the Bishop and drag him through the city if he dared to show his face there. These three were, however, granted the mercy of having their bodies buried in the church cemetery. All of the dead men were luckier than Klopriss, the apostles’ leader, who languished for three months in prison until he was burned at the stake, in February 1535.
The adventures of the apostles to Osnabrück were equally disastrous, but there was one who returned to tell the tale to the king and his court: Henry Graes, the schoolmaster. As reconstructed by Helmut Paulus from the accounts left by Kerssenbrück and Gresbeck, shortly after midnight on October 23, the Anabaptist guard at the Ludger Gate heard noises—chains rattling, a man’s voice calling out piteously for help. A cold, sleeting rain was falling, obscuring all vision. The guard called the captain of the watch, who said they could not open the gate door for fear that it was a trick of the Bishop’s to gain entry. Whatever was out there would have to wait until morning.
At dawn five men exited quietly through the small door of the gate to investigate further. The thin grass was iced with sleet and covered with a heavy frost that had descended after the rain had stopped. Under a naked, glistening thornbush lay the body of a man whose hands and feet were bound with heavy iron chains. The captain peered at the gray, stubble-bearded face; the man’s cheeks were sunken, his thin lips were blue; he was unconscious, more dead than alive, and barely recognizable as the apostle from Borken, Henry Graes. The men carried the schoolmaster into the city and before a gathering crowd rubbed his limbs vigorously. After a time Graes opened his eyes, looked around at his old friends, and sighed, “The great Lord has had mercy on me, and I am with you again! Take me to the king, for I have a message for him.”
Still in his chains, barely conscious, Graes was carried to Jan’s court, accompanied by a crowd singing psalms of praise for his deliverance. When he had recovered sufficiently to eat and drink, he told King Jan and his advisers what had happened to him and his brothers in Osnabrück.
After their departure on the evening of the great feast, Graes said, he and Dionysus Vinne and their four companions had made their way safely through the enemy’s lines and arrived at Osnabrück the following morning. They asked a man in the street for directions to the house of Otto Spieker, who they had been told was a strong supporter of the cause. Spieker greeted the apostles warily. Graes dropped one of the gold coins at Spieker’s feet. Spieker thanked him for the gift but said Graes was misinformed; he was not an Anabaptist and they could not stay in his house. Dionysus Vinne looked at him suspiciously and said they had no fear, because they were under the Lord’s protection, and that Spieker should know that whoever lied about or betrayed even one of them was betraying the will of the Heavenly Father.
The apostles marched onward to the City Square, where they quickly gathered a crowd that seemed receptive to the sermon preached by Vinne, but soon a company of soldiers arrived to seize them. Spieker was at their head. “There they are!” he cried; “those are the men who boasted that they have come from Münster to preach the Thousand-Year Kingdom of King Jan!” The crowd boiled angrily around the soldiers, but Vinne shouted that they should stand back, that he and his companions were not criminals or disturbers of the peace but men of God. They would go with the soldiers without protest. And so they did, singing hymns and surrounded by admiring followers, as they were marched to the Bock Tower prison. The captain of the guard told Vinne that it was not right to treat men of God in this way, and he was sorry. Vinne responded that the captain was a true brother in spirit, and that God would remember his kindness in the hour of judgment that was so close at hand. For the rest, who would so mistreat the children of God, they could expect only the harshest of punishment.
When the crowd heard this, they turned with such fury on Otto Spieker that the traitor was forced to flee for his life. The jailer, like the captain of the guard, treated the prisoners well, laying out a thick bed of straw for them and bringing food and wine. Vinne’s group had great support among the council because they had so clearly wanted to avoid violence; the traitor Otto Spieker had been driven from the city, probably to Iburg to seek refuge with the Bishop. When he heard this, Dionysus Vinne, far from comforted, began to pray.
Early the following morning, long before the sympathetic council could meet to debate the fate of the apostles, a dozen of the Bishop’s soldiers forced the guard to open the cell door. They tied the hands and feet of the prisoners and threw them bodily into heavy carts by the city gate. Spieker had sold them out to the Bishop, into whose dungeon at Iburg they were cast before noon. Over the next few days they were all tortured, some with red-hot-glowing tongs that tore pieces of flesh from their bodies, others with thumb-presses turned by heavy screws, and, on the rack, Dionysus Vinne, with so much weight and pressure that his back was broken and he was paralyzed. But none of them had lost his faith in the Lord, Graes said, despite all of their torment.
Even worse than the physical torture for the apostles was their isolation from each other, in separate cells, chained hand and foot, hearing each day from their keeper that their brothers in Soest, Coesfeld, and Warendorf had all been taken and killed. Their cruel warden did not know that his most crushing news, that Dionysus Vinne had died of his great and painful injuries, was seen as a sign of God’s mercy. But Graes’s faith began to waver when he heard the sounds of a scaffold being constructed in the courtyard of the Iburg palace, and when he was told that he and his brothers were to lose their heads in the morning, he did not think he could stand any more.
Gresbeck does not tell us how Jan and his retinue received this dreadful news, though Paulus shows the king as impatient and curious to hear how Graes had managed to evade death himself. The answer to that question was, indeed, a tale to inspire wonder and awe.
The schoolmaster told Jan that as he lay in his cell, cold and hungry and in irons, he called out aloud
to God for strength at the moment of his coming martyrdom. When he opened his eyes after prayer, a bright, shimmering shaft of light appeared before him, and a voice called his name: “Henry Graes!” “I am here!” Graes cried, “I am here!” And then the light dissolved and the angel of the Lord stood before Henry Graes, a glowing sword in his hand. “Rise up!” the angel said. “How should I stand?” Graes replied. “You must see how miserably I lie upon the earth, bound hand and foot with chains!” The angel took him by the hand, and the chains became as light as twine and he felt strength flowing again into his limbs. “Come with me,” the angel commanded. “The scaffold is ready; all my brothers must die. How can I leave them now?” Graes pleaded. “Leave me with them, I beg of you.” The angel’s eyes burned into his heart, Graes said. “The Lord has chosen you to return to the Holy City of Zion,” the awful voice said. “You must bear witness before the king and his people. You must let your faith be an example to them that the Lord Almighty will save those who stand firm in their faith, even while the weak must die without His help.” The voice was like thunder in his ears, so loud that Graes fell backward in his chains, hitting his head on the stone floor and losing consciousness.
When he awoke, it was to find himself nearly frozen under a thorn-bush, gazing upward at the faces of his brothers in Christ. Truly, he had been saved by the grace of his Lord.
9
RESTITUTION AND REVENGE
The most dangerous follower is he whose defection would destroy the whole party: that is to say, the best follower.
The Tailor-King Page 15
